Sold Out St Patrick’s Charity Ball in Manchester raises £50,000 for Orphanage

A Sold Out St Patrick’s Day Charity Ball at the Gorton Monastery in Manchester helped raise over £50,000 to help the Good Life Orphanage celebrate their 10th Anniversary. The event was hailed as one of the major highlight of this year’s 2018 Manchester Irish Festival.

When asked about how the event went, one of the organisers Roisin O’Gara replied “"We were delighted to stage a St Patrick's Dinner to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the charity and to raise vital funds for The Good Life Orphanage. It is a fantastic charity which relies on events like this to keep it going. The Monastery has a unique atmosphere and we had such a great time at our last St Patrick's Dinner there we were delighted to come back and stage it on St Patrick's Feast day itself this year."

The Manchester based charity set up by Mary Maguire and her husband Kevin looks after orphaned, abandoned and vulnerable children in Kenya, Africa. The first Orphanage opened in 2008 and now cares for 65 orphaned children. In 2012 the St Bernadette Mary School was opened on the adjoining site and educates 300 pupils from impoverished backgrounds along with the 50 children from The Good Life Orphanage who all receive a free education. The charity is quite unique in that every single penny raised goes directly to the orphanage (no administration travel or accommodation costs are taken by anyone involved in the charity, who all self-fund their costs).

This Black Tie Event was one of the highlights of the 2018 Manchester Irish Festival and is a major fundraising event for the charity. Their was a fantastic line up of Irish entertainment which included: The Fianna Phadraig Pipe Band, The Grace Kennedy School of Irish Dance, DJ & Compere - Joe Casserley , Sweeney & Sullivan (Female Vocal Duet), The Reel Rhythms Dance Troupe, plus Irish Fiddle Maestro Richard Sanderson and the Commotion Band.

Tony Hennigan the press officer for the Manchester Irish Festival website added "I love the Gorton Monastery, we staged our sell-out Young, Gifted & Green show there and the Irish community loved the connection to its history and the iconic building. It is rated as one of the top ten buildings in the world and once you step inside it, you can see why. It was great to see it lit up in Green as part of Tourism Ireland's Global Greening campaign. People are still talking about the last St Patrick's Dinner held there in 2016 and it was great to come back and stage another great night there during the festival."